Ringing endorsement

Wreak havoc on Sundays. Religiously connect with his best friend on Tuesdays. Such was the routine Darren Woodson steadfastly clung to for 12 seasons with the Dallas Cowboys.

Always when his teammates on the three Super Bowl championship teams of the 1990s scattered to enjoy the end of their only off day of the week, Woodson remained tethered to his home telephone, hovering over the increasingly obsolete landline like an expectant father anticipating news.

Like Sunday’s, the Tuesday regiment was tightly wrapped in rules. After dinner, the best friend would pick up a telephone back in Woodson’s home state of Arizona and ask for a connection to an approved number in Dallas. Always it was at 9 p.m. in the Woodson home. Always there were 15 minutes to talk. Always the calls were collect.

Such were the rules imposed by the Arizona Department of Corrections.

Woodson clung to the landline long after he retired as the Cowboys’ all-time leading tackler in 2003. It was the passé umbilical cord that pumped life into an odd couple relationship between the unassailable professional sports hero and his career gangster friend.

The calls kept coming until September 2012 when Keith Tucker served out almost 24 years in an Arizona prison for killing a man in a Phoenix drug war.

When possible, Woodson veered from the long-distance relationship to visit the prison in Florence, Ariz., about 60 miles southeast of Phoenix. Woodson was disappointed that he couldn’t see his best friend during the Cowboys’ 1996 Super Bowl week in the Phoenix area. Being whisked away in the aftermath of victory to the Pro Bowl in Hawaii only delayed the inevitable. Within weeks, Woodson, his then young son D.J. in tow, visited Tucker behind bars.

Woodson prominently displayed photographic evidence of the visit on the shelf of his Valley Ranch locker for the rest of his Cowboys career.

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Keith Tucker got to meet his longtime friend Darren Woodson's son D.J. when the Woodsons visited the prison Tucker was held at in Arizona in 1996. (Darren Woodson/1996)

“You would do it too for your guy, too,” Woodson said in a recent interview. “I know what he did was tragic. But from where we came from, tragedy was a way of life.”

An interview was arranged at a North Dallas coffee shop, down the street from Woodson’s home, to talk about the path taken. Five minutes in, Woodson introduced Tucker, who remains his best friend, into the conversation.

“Did I ever think I would make it to this point in my life?” the 46-year old Woodson said, echoing a question between sips from a cardboard cup.

“Where I grew up, there weren’t a lot of people who got out,” Woodson finally said. “If you want to know what kind of place it was, I’ll tell you about my best friend from the projects.”

The next day, 800 miles away in an Atlanta-area apartment, warehouseman Tucker took time from celebrating his 46th birthday to talk via cellphone about the friend he calls “D.”

“Tuesdays talking to D gave me a reason to get out,” he said. “My mother prayed for me. D gave me hope. My gang-banging friends, those suckers I thought were my friends, turned their backs on me. Every one of them disappeared.

“Only Darren Ray Woodson stayed with me in prison,” Tucker said. “That’s the kind of man he has always been.”

Darren Ray Woodson grew up the youngest of four children in the best homes his hard-working mother, Freddie Luke, could provide. The family lived in a hardscrabble area of a West Phoenix neighborhood called Maryvale. Woodson’s older sister, Monica, said the family moved often because leases ended and landlords invariably wanted to raise rents. There never seemed to be extra money to cover the increases.

Darren’s father, Arthur Woodson, who also lived in the neighborhood, remained a ghost in his son’s life.

One of the family’s moves landed Darren two doors down from the Tucker family.

Darren and the Tuckers' only son, Keith, six months younger, grew into fast friends. Eventually, Darren took to calling Keith’s father, who treated Woodson as a second son, “Pops.”

Whenever the boys went out to eat or to the movies or anywhere else they needed money, it was always Keith, courtesy of Pops, who paid.

“Man, I had the money,” Tucker said. “Darren didn’t. What’s the big deal?”

As freshmen at Maryvale High they tried out together for the football team. By then Darren had morphed into a hot shot, well on his way to growing into a rock hard 6-1, 220-pound frame. It wasn’t long before he was elevated to varsity. Keith, who would fill out at 5-7, 160 pounds, was left behind to play on junior varsity. Eventually, he quit the team and found refuge on the streets.

“D moved into one fast lane,” Tucker said. “I moved into a fast lane headed in a different direction.”

Darren Ray Woodson

Age: 46

College: Arizona State

Acquired by Cowboys: Second round of 1992 NFL draft (37th pick)

Position: Strong safety

Accolades: Named to five Pro Bowl and three All-Pro teams

Notable: All-time Cowboys leader in tackles. ... Pro Football Hall of Fame semifinalist in 2015. ... One of two Cowboys to receive Athletes in Action’s annual Bart Starr Award for NFL player who best exemplifies character and leadership on and off the field. (Jason Witten is the other.)

While Darren gained fame and attention as a Maryvale High Panther, Keith gained notoriety as a member of a gang known as The Downtown Posse.

Not that the young Woodson didn’t have his moments.

“I did my share,” he said. “Most people I looked up to were on the streets. I ran some with them. But I was lucky.”

Woodson had the good fortune to learn from the misfortune of others.

By Woodson’s count, three uncles spent time in prison while he was growing up.

When his mother would visit her brother, Sam, 60 miles away at a prison in Florence, she took her children. It was not for the company of the ride but for a lesson in life.

“I became scared to death of incarceration,” Woodson said.

Woodson’s brothers, Randy and Todd, also made sure their baby brother stayed away from what Darren calls “the real gangsters.”

But ultimately, it was the fear of his mother’s wrath that kept him from the vices of the streets.

Freddie Luke worked two jobs to support her family. She put in 30 years at the Maricopa County courthouse, where she shifted from clerical position to position. The job paid so poorly that she had to work nights to try to make ends meet.

But life at the courthouse came with an important perk. She came to know police officers, lots of them. Some patrolled Maryvale. Sometimes they came in contact with Darren. Sometimes when they rounded up neighborhood boys in “zero tolerance” sweeps, they recognized Ms. Luke’s son. Somehow he always managed to slip home to his mother.

“She stayed a thumb on me,” he said. “I wouldn’t even steal from a store. Her presence was always in the front of my mind.”

Teammates again

In their senior year at Maryvale High, Darren talked Keith into going out for football again. He thought it would keep his friend off the streets for at least a little while.

Keith made it as a reserve defensive back on a team that featured Woodson and future NFL cornerback Phillippi Sparks.

While Woodson was pleased to have his old friend around, his teammates disapproved. They warned him to stay away from Keith, who carried his gang colors from the streets to the locker room.

“They didn’t want me around,” Tucker said. “I was the one twisted up with hoodlums.

“But there was nothing for anyone to worry about with me and D,” he said. “I always separated him from the madness. I didn’t want him around that.”

Woodson recalls that sometimes Tucker ushered him to leave neighborhood parties because of who else and what else was present.

Other times the friends would get into Tucker’s car to cruise around the neighborhood on a mission they discussed with no one else.

“We’d drive around looking for D’s father,” Keith said. “We’d head to places we thought he might be at. D just wanted to see him. He wanted to connect. It didn’t happen.”

Woodson’s sister, Monica Luke, said the few times she saw her baby brother cry came after hours of hopeful waiting, glued to a window for a promised visit from a father who never showed.

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But football never seemed to disappoint. It was at a high school camp at nearby Arizona State University that an assistant coach told Woodson he could play in college, “if you keep right.”

The coach proved prescient. By the end of Woodson’s junior season, the coach was competing with recruiters from all over the western United States.

But big-time college football almost proved beyond his reach.

One day, the Arizona State assistant asked to examine a transcript of grades.

“I looked at it,” recalled Don Bocchi, now a senior associate athletic director at the school. “And then I looked at him.”

Back and forth the coach’s head swiveled.

“Coach is something wrong?” Woodson asked.

“There is nothing right,” Bocchi bellowed. “You don’t have the grades to go to college.”

Woodson didn’t understand what grades had to do with college football. They didn’t seem to matter in high school.

“I thought high school was for fun,” he said. “I really messed up.”

Cowboys Ring of Honor

Bob Lilly DT, 1961–1974

Don Meredith QB, 1960–1968

Don Perkins RB, 1961–1968

Chuck Howley LB, 1961–1973

Mel Renfro CB, 1964–1977

Roger Staubach QB, 1969–1979

Lee Roy Jordan LB, 1963–1976

Tom Landry Head coach, 1960–1988

Tony Dorsett RB, 1977–1987

Randy White DT, 1975–1988

Bob Hayes WR, 1965–1974

Tex Schramm General manager, 1960–1989

Cliff Harris S, 1970–1979

Rayfield Wright OT, 1967–1979

Troy Aikman QB, 1989–2000

Michael Irvin WR, 1988–1999

Emmitt Smith RB, 1990–2002

Drew Pearson WR, 1973–1983

Charles Haley DE, 1992–1996

Larry Allen OL, 1994–2005

Darren Woodson S, 1992–2004

But Bocchi wouldn’t let go. He helped Woodson enroll at Arizona State in a program for underachieving students. The penalty, however, was no football in what would have been his freshman season. In the college football vernacular of the day, he was labeled a “Prop 48,” named for those who did not meet minimum NCAA standards. Woodson wore the label as if it were a scarlet letter.

There was no scholarship. He lived at home. He commuted to school. He was forced to take a part-time job. He heard the whispers around campus and thought he saw finger-pointing. But he studied hard and stayed the course.

Bocchi was particularly impressed by Woodson’s punctuality. He never missed their weekly meetings. He always arrived on time. He never left Bocchi looking for him. He was a rarity in the world of student athletes, Bocchi said.

Also that season without football, Woodson was mesmerized with a young, first-year assistant coach at Arizona State.

“He enlightened me to the world,” Woodson said. “He showed me how much life had to offer outside the neighborhood.”

It wasn’t long before Lovie Smith, now the coach of the NFL Tampa Bay Buccaneers, was inviting Woodson to his home for meals and to simply hang out.

“You could see Darren was looking for something different,” Smith said by telephone from Tampa. “You now see a finished product. But he was special back then, too. My wife, you can’t trick her. She’s seen them all in my decades coaching. She loves Darren as much as anyone she’s met in football.”

Woodson earned the right to play as a sophomore in 1988. His preseason work set off a firestorm among the assistant coaches. Each wanted Woodson, a running back and linebacker in high school, to play for him.

Three games into his first season as an Arizona State linebacker in 1988, Woodson hurt his back. Football again was over for the year. But he stayed close to the team and had time to work harder in the classroom.

On Dec. 5 of that that year, Tucker found himself embroiled in a drug-related shootout between his gang, The Downtown Posse, related to the infamous Los Angeles-based Crips, and an offshoot of their rival Bloods. Guns blazed. A rival gang member lay dead, shot in the head. Tucker eventually pleaded guilty to among other things, manslaughter and possession of illegal drugs for sale.

When he heard about Tucker’s arrest, Woodson did the only thing he could. He broke down and cried.

Darren Woodson talks with kids in the Frisco Football League after presenting the organization with an equipment check. (Stewart F. House/File 2014)

But evidence would suggest they were hardly overwhelmed. Flush with draft picks from the bountiful trade of Herschel Walker to the Minnesota Vikings, the Cowboys made Woodson a second-round pick in 1992. But that was only after they had selected cornerback Kevin Smith, linebacker Robert Jones and wide receiver Jimmy Smith.

Although he started two games in his rookie season, Woodson chafed on the bench most of his rookie season. He made his biggest impression on kickoff and punt coverage teams. The action invigorated him. Long after establishing himself as a premier safety, he remained active on the kick coverage teams, unusual for a player of his stature.

When Woodson became a starter in 1993, he gave the Cowboys an invaluable weapon. He could stop running backs like a linebacker and cover wide receivers like a cornerback. He allowed the defense to always be prepared for either eventuality.

En route to a Super Bowl return in Atlanta, Woodson set a Cowboys season record for tackles by a defensive back. By the time he retired, he was credited with 1,350 tackles, more than any Cowboy before or since.

He made an equally positive impression off the field even as he kept a relatively low profile on a team with the likes of future Hall of Famers Troy Aikman, Emmitt Smith, Michael Irvin, Larry Allen and Charles Haley. He remained quiet and reserved. It was something that did not go unnoticed in the wild and wooly days of the likes of Irvin, Haley and Nate Newton.

“From the minute he walked through the door, you knew he was the type of man that you wanted to be a representative of your organization both on and off the field,” said Cowboys owner Jones, who once made Woodson the highest paid safety in NFL history. “He just knew how to do things the right way. That was a constant throughout his time as a Cowboy and into his post-playing career. He’s always had the right stuff.”

Keith Tucker, Darren Woodson's childhood friend, shows off the jersey that Woodson gave Tucker while he was in prison. (Submitted photo)

Woodson played his final season for Bill Parcells. The coach told the player he recognized his personality. He thought Woodson thrived playing for tough men. Woodson agreed.

On Tuesday nights, Woodson showed his softer side, regaling Tucker with tales of the Cowboys’ accomplishments. No detail was too small for Tucker to soak in and repeat to fellow inmates. His Cowboys connection, he said, made him prison royalty.

Soon after Tucker’s 2012 release from prison, Woodson flew him to Dallas for five days of bonding. He gave Tucker money to start a new life and encouraged him to move away and not return to Phoenix.

In a cellphone world where a tap on a screen can make a connection, Woodson can rattle off Tucker’s number.

Woodson expects lots of family, including his mother, and a bountiful number of friends from around the country to surround him at Ring of Honor festivities. He invited Tucker and his mother, too. “Pops” has passed away.

But when he was hired at the warehouse in Georgia, Tucker was told there likely would be no weekends off. No exceptions. Don’t even ask.

“I don’t know if I can make it,” Tucker said. “It will kill me, but my friend, my brother, will understand.

“Wouldn’t it be something if I have to re-live it with D through a phone call.”